This year’s winners of the Stanford Center on Longevity’s annual Design Challenge explain how working with seniors challenged their assumptions about product design and innovation itself

People often assume millennial designers only want to create products popular with their own generation, like the next wearable device or smartphone app. And while that may be true for some, we’ve personally been much more inspired by designing a product for people nowhere near our age. In the process, we also learned a lot that challenged our assumptions about design in general.

Our initial product goal—a tool to prevent falling

The specific product was a tool to help functionally-limited people and seniors—our submission for the annual Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge, which two of our mentors, a former researcher from IDEO and a design engineer, encouraged us to enter. We started the design process by researching unmet needs for elderly mobility, then identified a common problem: falling.